B. P. Nichol, who signs his published works bp Nichol, has ranged further and attempted more in his researches into language than many poets writing today. His formal experiments and his collaborations with other artists have extended the boundaries of...

Nichol's attitude towards writing (apparent or implicit) [is] one of the keys to an understanding of his work. Nichol's goal is to escape from the barriers of what Edward Sapir terms "a straight ideational language" in order to "return to the root elements of both the written and aural language." Sapir, Nichol's main source for this theory, also asserts that "ideation reigns supreme in language." In order to counteract this domination, Nichol th...

[In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid] Nichol's jokes are, however, on potentially serious subjects. To work out all the thematic implications which his fifteen paragraphs barely suggest may seem like building mountains out of molehills; and, though I believe the foundations are there for such an enterprise, the elaboration should not obscure the fact that the most characteristic virtues of Nichol's book are its wit, its economy, and its refusal to take itself too seriously. Nichol's...

During the early sixties, it was obvious that throughout the entire English-speaking world poetry was lagging far behind the visual arts, and I see bp Nichol's publication [bp] as part of poetry's catching-up process. Nichol has freed poetry from melody and meaning and levitated it above the printed page. He has brought it nearer both music and painting by freeing it from what we used to think songs and pictures were. Although the poet … has no musical training, I found his plastic reco...